US has gone past 1GWh of installed battery capacity, with help from utilities

US has gone past 1GWh of installed battery capacity, with help from utilities

US utilities deployed more than 520MWh of energy storage on their networks in 2017, bringing the country’s cumulative installed capacity of grid-connected energy storage systems to over 1GWh, trade organisation Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) has found.

By the end of 2017, 922.8MW / 1293.6MWh of grid-connected storage capacity was on US networks across 5,167 systems. Throughout 2017, utilities alone interconnected 216.7MW / 523.9MWh to the grid, amounting to 2,588 systems. Surveying 137 utilities, SEPA said 13.3MW / 29.3MWh of residential systems were added during the year, with 59MW / 139.7MWh of non-residential and 144.4MW / 354.9MWh of utility-supply systems.

SEPA, which considers its remit to be that of helping utilities to deploy clean and smart distributed energy solutions, publishes regular ‘Top 10’ lists ranking utilities in the US by the amount of solar deployed in their respective services areas, has this time out issued a 52-page report which can be found on the organisation’s website. As well as including rankings of energy storage utility deployment figures, both in watts and watts-per-customer, the report features in-depth analysis of the national picture state-by-state as well as at national or federal level.

From the top-down perspective, it appears durations of storage are increasing. Overall deployments in megawatts across the US rose by 5% from 2016 to 2017, while the corresponding megawatt-hour figure rose by 104%.